App-PigLatin

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                              BY

                          HIS WIDOW.





Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated

myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see

Queequeg near me.  Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was

a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.

This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice

my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read,

and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.

Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names

appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not;

but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery,

and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance

if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure

that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing

hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused

the old wounds to bleed afresh.



Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass;

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successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.

But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.

The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.

'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward,

so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'



"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed,

still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings

of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags

into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns

in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;

and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him,

as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound,

and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth,

Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.



"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;

and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish,

all careening, glides to sea.  That ship, my friends,

was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband

was Jonah.  But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden.

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frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang,

his steady notes were heard,--



             "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,

                Stand dressed in living green.

              So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

                While Jordan rolled between."





Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then.

They were full of hope and fruition.  Spite of this frigid winter night

in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket,

there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store;

and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up

by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.



At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were

needed no longer.  The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us

began ranging alongside.



It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were

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earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness

of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide field

of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop

(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues

of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;--

it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,

saddest city thou can'st see.  For Lima has taken the white veil;

and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.

Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new;

admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over

her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes

its own distortions.



I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness

is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror

of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there

aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind

almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited

under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality.

What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively

elucidated by the following examples.

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to Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed

head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one

dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders.

And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing

him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.



At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with

what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman

will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched

about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas.

Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the logger

head itself, under such circumstances.  But the sight of little

Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;

for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,

barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously

rolled his fine form.  On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask

seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.

Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask

would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added

heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest.

So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living

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At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all

this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts

were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental

and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary

tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, &c.,

consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland

and Spitzbergen whale fishery.  In the first place, the amount

of butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing.

I impute it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures,

being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their vocation,

and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar Seas,

on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial

natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.



The quantity of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels.

Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short

summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch

whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea,

did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men

to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen

in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer

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then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else;

but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.



Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught

one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell;

for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind

him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East,

and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.



But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old

man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it!  It has happened before.

Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our compasses--that's all.

Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."



"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the

pale mate, gloomily.



Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have

in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms.

The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is,

as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven;